


Peace of Mind and Our Release

by rael_ellan



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Arthur Pendragon Returns, Gen, Potential depression, Reincarnation, potential ptsd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-03
Updated: 2015-07-03
Packaged: 2018-04-07 13:04:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4264236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rael_ellan/pseuds/rael_ellan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time he saw Morgana again, he couldn’t breathe. She was laughing, head tipped back and arm in arm with a man he’d never seen before. They staggered together down the road, passing Merlin without so much as a glance. </p><p>By the time he found Gwaine, he was almost expecting it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Peace of Mind and Our Release

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Poets of the Fall, 'Can You Hear Me'.
> 
> This is an idea that, I am aware, has been done so many times it's almost impossible to keep up with them all, but I still felt the need to write it. Since I've been trying, on and off, to write for this fandom since Series 1, I thought I'd just go with it.

The first time he saw Morgana again, he couldn’t breathe. She was laughing, head tipped back and arm in arm with a man he’d never seen before. They staggered together down the road, passing Merlin without so much as a glance. 

Behind them came a slow parade of other men and women, some dancing, some weeping, wearing fine robes and dresses of silk, fine as gossamer. Even when he stepped out of the shadows, none of them seemed to notice him as they flitted in and out of the street lights. 

In the east, a flicker of light began to spread across the sky, melting it from blue to gold and, as one, the visions disappeared. Whether they had ever been there to begin with, Merlin couldn’t say. 

It was 1710, and he was alone again.

\----

Guinevere he found in a jeweller’s store, in 1912. She was stood, quiet, meek, with her hands clasped in front of her, and smiling with the dull blankness of someone who had worked just too many hours to be comfortable. 

“May I help you, sir?”

If the woman behind him, trying to get into the door, hadn’t coughed her displeasure, he might have wept. As it was, with one last long look at Gwen, he turned and fled.

\----

Somehow, Merlin had never considered that the others might return, too. Arthur was the Once and Future King; of course _he_ would return, but to see Gwen - kind, sweet, _wonderful_ Gwen, who had been his friend and ally even after Arthur’s death - to see her look at him with _nothing_ in her eyes was almost too much to bear. 

He had lost her once, hadn’t he? To the slow decay of time that had taken them all, in the end, no matter who or what they had once been. Wasn’t that enough? 

\---

After Camlann, he had never been able to bring himself to turn back, to walk the familiar, lonely road back to Camelot. He had wandered the lands, from kingdom to kingdom, regardless of borders or laws, and words had sprung up around him. 

_He is a demon_ , some said, only just out of hearing. _He is a monster, he is a murderer. He is magic._

It spread before him like the sea, the tales of Camlann and the Great Deeds he had done. Some were lies, some were true. Some balanced neatly between them; a little falsehood to sweeten the sour nature of his being. 

Every now and again, he would meet bandits on the road, or some unfortunate sorcerer would attempt to capture him for their own gain. They vanished, neatly and quietly, and he could never truly remember what he’d done with them. 

\----

He found Lancelot sitting in a wood, leaning his bandaged head against a tree. His eyes opened as Merlin approached and fixed on him, but otherwise he made no move. 

For a while they sat like that; a moment of peace while the guns roared beyond the trees, and Lancelot’s fine green tunic slowly turned to red. 

“Have you come to kill me?”

His voice was soft, rasping with the effort of it, and Merlin felt his heart break all over again.

“No.”

Lancelot smiled. 

“Then are you an angel?”

Despite himself, Merlin smiled, and felt his eyes begin to burn. 

“I’m anything but that.”

Shifting his weight must have caused Lancelot unthinkable pain, but he didn’t let it reach his face. 

He held out his hand, fingers trembling with the effort of it. 

“If I am to die, I would rather it be among friends.” When he saw Merlin’s hesitation, he offered again, “Please. I know it’s a funny thing to ask, with all this going on, but would you see that they bury me? I don’t want… I don’t”

Merlin reached out and clasped his hand so tightly that his knuckles turned white. 

“I swear it.”

For all it’s faults, for all the chances it stripped from him, Merlin was grateful, at least, that his magic could do this. He carried Lancelot across the sea, back to Albion, and lost him again to the Lady of the Lake.

\----

People soon learned to stay out of his way on his travels. So many years after Camlann, hardly anyone recognised him as the Great Sorcerer anymore. Instead, when he passed, they went on with their little lives, gossiping and smiling, bringing in the harvest, enjoying life.

Every now and again, as Albion spread to encompass the land, he would encounter knights, resplendent in their flowing red cloaks. He tried to ignore them, ducking his head and walking as quickly as he dared. 

They only stopped him once. 

He’d been walking for days, a week perhaps, without rest. He didn’t like to dream, now. Though she was long gone, Morgana haunted his nights, moving so suddenly between a creature of nightmare and a piteous child that she exhausted him by her mere presence in his mind. 

He wondered if he had exhausted her the same way.

Lost in his thoughts, he didn’t notice himself slipping to the ground, into unconsciousness, but when he woke, it was to Leon’s patient, tired gaze. He looked older, so much older. His hair was more grey than blonde and the lines around his eyes were deep. 

He sat beside Merlin on the bed, cloak cast aside for the moment. 

“You know, you will always have a place in Camelot. Always, Merlin.”

A part of Merlin’s heart had jumped at it, leaping into his throat and sticking fast. 

He waited for Leon to sleep before he slipped out the door and vanished into the night.

\----

“Is there something I can do for you, or are you just here to gawp like the others?”

Gaius stood imperiously, surrounded by books and oddities, with his hands tucked into his sleeves and one eyebrow raised, as disapproving and irascible as ever he had once been.

It has been so long, so very long, but Merlin thought he felt himself smile.

“Gawp?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know. Are you actually interested in that book, or do you simply think it a curiosity?”

“Isn’t curiosity a good thing?”

“That depends entirely on what you plan to do with it.”

His eyes began to burn again and he struggled not to laugh as he replaced _The History and Practice of English Magic_ and left the shop.

\----

Merlin, himself, seemed frozen in time. While the world around him shifted, changed, he remained simply Merlin, unless he chose to age himself. 

Sometimes it was easier, looking as old as he felt. People moved out of his way with a nod, and no one expected him to listen to them, or to stop for a conversation. It allowed him to keep his silence, when he wanted it. 

Then there were days when the long hair, the robes he swaddled himself in made him want to scream. He would scratch viciously at his skin - his hand, his throat, his arms - until his magic engaged itself and dragged him back from the brink, back to the face he had worn in Camelot. 

On those days, he enjoyed the way the crowd would press about him in the streets, careless and mindless as to his movements, his business. Where they stood aside for Dragoon, they thought they could command the boy Merlin, and the arrogance of it amused him. 

Then, slowly, as the years passed, the anger would grow again. His hair would turn silver, and he would start to croak, if he spoke at all.

\----

By the time he found Gwaine, he was almost expecting it. 

The Lake of Avalon, as everything else in Albion, had changed so drastically from those early days that it always startled him to see it now, exposed and bare beside the road. The woods were gone, ground down for fires and fields and farming, and people took motor boats out on the lake. 

Gwaine was laughing, scrambling out of the water with his hair slicked back against his head. He shouted something to someone on the shore, waving them off and rolling his eyes when they ran to him anyway, holding his face between their hands and kissing him softly. 

Merlin was young again, in 1976, and something swelled in him, to see his friends happy. The world was changing, and not all of it was bad. 

Over Percival’s broad shoulder, as he nuzzled at Gwaine’s neck, he caught Gwaine looking at him. He was frowning, staring openly, as though trying to solve a puzzle. Merlin gave him a smile, a nonchalant wave, and walked away.

\----

Uther, when he finally resurfaced, was the first to be so drastically changed from what he once was.

Merlin saw him standing on the jetty, gazing out across the Channel, and felt light flare up inside him. Memories he had shoved back, boxed away to be taken out only at special, particular moments came rushing back, and for a moment he swayed. 

A man emerged from the boathouse and approached Uther. A man with golden hair. 

The light blazed, roaring inside him and filling his head with static, but his magic didn’t respond. 

It was not Arthur. It had never been Arthur. The form was too small, too lithe, too delicate in it’s features. It was not Arthur.

Yet the similarity was not entirely misplaced. He realised the truth of it as Uther turned and smiled at the man, raised his hand to kiss his knuckles. 

He left them to their silent harmony, feeling curiously peaceful knowing that Uther and Ygraine found happiness together at last. 

\----

Time passed strangely for an immortal. It was immaterial, and yet it was necessity. No matter how hard he tried to block it out, block out the years, the centuries, it was impossible to ignore for long 

The hope, fierce and bright and _brutal_ that Uther had brought, only made it worse. He found himself looking for Arthur in ways he had never allowed himself before, in shop windows and libraries and down to the Lake once again. 

Nothing. 

The years passed and hope faded to a dull throb, boxed away as much as he could with Arthur’s smile and the way Excalibur had gleamed beneath the Dragon’s breath. 

He went North. 

He kept to the roads as much as he could, walking as close against the hedgerows and hard shoulders as he could. He hated the stink of the cars, the rush and roar of the wind as they passed. They unnerved him as much now as they had in 1910, but at least the noise made it harder to think. 

He kept his long hair tied back, keeping it out of his way as much as he could. It was starting to annoy him again, starting to tug in the wrong places. He would banish it soon. 

Despite all the noise and lights of this new age, there were still quiet places in the world. A few points, some metres away from the busiest roads in England, where he could still hear the thrum of the old magic, deep in the Earth. It was always disheartening to find one that had faded away. 

Stormy Point had once held a great deal of magic, restless and reckless just beneath the surface of the world. Now, it was all but gone. Merlin took a moment to push down into the Earth with his magic, reaching out to the small well still left there and filling it as much as he could. 

It was the least he could do. 

He looked out across the Cheshire Plain. His hand itched. 

\----

He stayed by the Edge for longer than he had expected. The little magic left there called to him, lifting his own magic and drawing him back whenever he thought of leaving. It wanted something from him, but he couldn’t think what. 

He found himself back on Stormy Point, staring out and thinking. Day slipped through into night and back again, and he remained. People passed him by, sat on the bench behind him and commented on the view, moved on. A dog sniffed at him, howled, and left him alone. 

It started to rain. 

His hair was dark again, and his skin no longer ached against itself. It made it easier, somehow, to reach into the Earth, to search and let his magic dance again. He sent tendrils of it out, questing. Something was there, prickling against him, not unpleasantly. 

Another sorcerer, perhaps, testing their wings? 

Not quite. It was different, older. From a time beyond. There was something _there_ , in the Earth. Something, something - 

“Excuse me?”

The voice cut him off, and he lost the thread. His magic snapped back and awareness hit him once more.

It was raining. 

“Um, excuse me?”

Had that helped, perhaps? Rain had power of its own, after all. Perhaps if he just-

“You better not be ignoring me on purpose. I got wet to come out here.”

 _I didn’t ask you to_ , Merlin found himself thinking, and surprised himself.

“Here I am, trying to be nice and all you can do is look at… What are you looking at?”

Merlin didn’t usually have to explain himself; they saw something in his eyes, or felt something tug at the back of their minds, and left him alone. He turned towards the stranger, letting his magic shift _just a little_ , to thrum _danger_ into the man’s mind and…

Stopped. 

Arthur _was_ wet. Dripping, in fact, as though he’d just climbed out of a lake, and that really wasn’t a thought Merlin wanted to focus on. Except it _was_. 

He stared at Arthur, clutching at his own coat, soaked through and glaring at him like a petulant child. Like the old Arthur, he thought. But there was something in his eyes - his blue, wonderfully blue _real_ eyes - that was confused. 

Arthur didn’t know why he was standing on Stormy Point in the rain any more than Merlin did. 

The light flared up inside him again, and Merlin grinned.

**Author's Note:**

> I may or may not have also slipped in a reference to _Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell._ I tried hard not to, I really did!


End file.
